Summary

Tony started his career in '86 coding on the IBM mainframe with AS, PL/1, CICS, DB2 and System W. In ’95 he moved into Client/Server using Visual Basic, C++ and Oracle; he has worked with all versions of SQL Server since '93 starting with 4.21. In ’97 he became one of 22 people worldwide given the SQL Server MVP award by Microsoft, an award he has received yearly since.

He has significant business experience gained through a mixture of permanent and contract roles as well as significant consultancy experience in many sectors including Finance, Debt Management, Retail, Vehicle Tracking, Web related industries and from general technical product consultancy with Microsoft SQL Server.

In spring 2012 he completed his MSc in Business Intelligence from the University of Dundee, his research areas are GPGPU and distributed commodity computing. He is currently near the end of his Data Science PGCert at the University of Dundee as he expands his existing skills as a move towards a Data Scientist.

Tony is very well known in the UK SQL community as well as across the globe through founding the UK SQL Server User Group in ’97, a founder member of Developer Developer Developer, SQL Bits and SQL Relay community conferences.

Tony continues work within the SQL community by presenting at regional groups and writing technical blog articles through his blog on http://dataidol.com/tonyrogerson.

A trusted individual by many long term clients; more recent projects Tony has delivered are the Research website for Redburn Partners, partitioned schema design to accommodate an insert rate of over 1,000 rows per second for a Vehicle Tracking system , the rewriting of a debt management transactional costing system to SQL Server and public facing commoditised implementation of the gaming statistics service for Just Cause 2.

In September 2012 Tony was made a Fellow of the British Computer Society.

Consultant Database Specialist and Project Delivery

Tony helped set up the IT infrastructure at the company inception, he is responsible for the development of a number of in-house projects such as the Fidessa trade feed, Business Inteligence system and original CRM system. He is responsible for the development and delivery of the companies research system "IDEAS".

Database Specialist

Tony has been the lead Architect and Developer in the migration of the core business systems to Microsoft SQL Server, he has personally rewritten some of the core business systems such as collections costing and reporting, debtor tracing and arrangement calculations. He manages the Database platform – Availability, Consultancy, Database Design and Data Analysis.

Founder

Tony founded the UK SQL Server User group; the group provides a community for people to engage and learn around Microsoft SQL Server. Tony developed and manages http://sqlserverfaq.com which is the home of the user group. He regularly runs meetings in London and Reading and has many speaking engagements throughout the UK.

SQL Server Consultant

iGroup (Computacenter)

August 2000 – October 2001 (1 year 3 months)London, United Kingdom

Provided SQL Server expertise to the company; mainly involved in developing a Knowledge Management product called iFramework. Areas of responsibility - Database Design, design and development of the core search functionality (the KM schema was dynamic so all queries needed to be constructed from the KM meta data, the search allowed for many different data sources - linked servers, index server and full text.

Microsoft SQL Server DBA/Consultant

Primarily a SYBASE site, Microsoft SQL Server was been introduced throughout the bank via. third party and in-house development, SQL Server 6.5 and 7.0. Duties included skills transfer to the 6 strong team of SYBASE DBA's, consult with other departments within the company to assist them with design and tuning work around SQL Server, develop a security model for SQL Server in the bank and prove the migration of the build from RAID 5 to RAID 10.

Senior Analyst/Programmer

Role was full time with SQL Server in a developer and database administrator role (4.21a, 6.5 and 7.0) first working on a Global CRM system for the bank then on trading systems within the bank.

Senior Analyst/Programmer

Centre-file Ltd

September 1993 – May 1996 (2 years 9 months)

Worked with SQL Server (4.21a and 6.0) and Visual Basic (3.0 – 4.0) and had a lot more exposure to Windows NT, because of his expertise Tony was had a big part in developing Natwest Streamline (invoicing and transaction accumulation), Mondex (the electronic bank purse) and the Natwest workflow application.

Senior Analyst/Programmer

British Home Stores

June 1991 – September 1993 (2 years 4 months)

Worked on their BI/Reporting suite using Application System, DB2, System W, Oracle, Oracle Glue, Visual Basic 2.0 to extend the BI system and give the business new ways of slicing the data

Apprentice Production Systems Analyst

Vickers Shipbuilding Engineering Ltd

October 1987 – June 1991 (3 years 9 months)

Served an apprenticeship in their Production Engineering department using Application System and modelling using IDEF-0 and later in their IT department using PL/1, CICS and DB2.

Additional Organizations

Projects

A key component to the success of a Business Intelligence system is getting the requirements right; translating those requirements into code can be a time consuming process when dealing with large volumes of data or if the underlying table structure has a degree of complexity. Using hardware that does not provide responsive query times can mean extended consultancy hours which leads to increased cost or in the case of a fixed budget a narrower project scope.

The cost of server hardware has come down over the past decades, however, in order to get the IO’ps required to perform responsive queries still requires high initial outlay, outlay for a project that may not progress forward should the proof of concept not be successful.

Over the past decade commodity Solid State Devices (SSD) have been making inroads, especially for high end desktop machines used by gamers, enthusiasts and more recently business workstations. Reliability and performance has substantially increased; with SATA 3 appearing more on high end desktop motherboards the full throughput of SSD’s can be realised.

The Reporting Brick concept comes from the initial research performed by Jim Gray et al on Cyberbricks in the late 90’s where they used high capacity SATA hard drives to provide a cost effective solution to prove the scalability of SQL Server 2000 through the TerraServer project.

This project shows commodity kit can be used to great effect within the context of BI, delivering outstanding price-performance.

Research in using GPGPU's for Big Data through Massively Parallel Data Processing

February 2012 – Present

General Purpose Graphic Processing Units are specifically designed to process large volumes of data using many thousands of parallel concurrent threads. With the introduction of PCIe to combat host to device transfer throughput and with PCIe based flash storage to provide very high persisted storage throughput that now bottlenecks on the host CPU, the GPGPU is a perfect candidate for BigData processing. The project looks in-depth at how best to create synergy between BigData requirements and the massively parallel capabilities and throughput of the GPU cards.

Redburn Ideas Portal

March 2008 – November 2008

IDEAS Financial Redburn Partners produce financial reports to assist advice investors and fund managers. I developed an application integrated with a document management system. This allows Redburn to track, update and manage their reports and client base. Advisors can instantly publish a document to clients allowing them keep up with the markets